"Average Joe"

Yoshie Furuhashi furuhashi.1 at osu.edu
Wed Feb 19 07:40:34 PST 2003


At 9:08 AM -0500 2/19/03, David Jennings wrote:
>In Fisk's article and later in Taibbi's, the anti-anti-war
>protagonist (in the one case actual, in the other imaginary) is a
>male, and I'm pretty sure Anglo and Christian. You know - "Joe".
>That's the population among the working class that's not being
>reached, correct?

One question and one observation.

Question: White male workers are a heterogeneous bunch. Subdivided by age, income, and religion, which series of white male workers are "anti-anti-war"? Evidence?

Observation: When you belong to an established electoral political party in a two-party system and try to win an election, you pay the closest attention to "swing voters" -- those still sitting on the fence even late in the game, in whose minds such subjective cross-class questions as religion often trump objective class interests. When you try to build a social movement on the left, for instance, an anti-war movement, you begin with the most committed left-wing organizers and activists, and then you try to help about a third of your potential constituency (the potential constituency of an anti-war movement being all of the multiracial working class + the progressive segments, regardless of their classes, of the racially, ethnically, nationally, and/or religiously oppressed who are the most likely to become "collateral damages" of the war in the civil rights & liberties battleground) become firstly politically active and secondly move to the left. In short, in electoral politics, you look to the center, and in non-electoral politics, you look to the left. "Average Joe's" -- apolitical white male workers -- are less important in social movements on the left than in electoral politics. -- Yoshie

* Calendar of Events in Columbus: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/calendar.html> * Student International Forum: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/> * Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio> * Solidarity: <http://solidarity.igc.org/>



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